


Men Like You

by Prismatic Bell (Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Conversation, Gen, Grandpas Are Usually Pretty Smart, Life Choices, Reunion, Sage Advice, gratitude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-29
Updated: 2013-09-29
Packaged: 2017-12-27 22:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/984135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Dances_In_Technicolor/pseuds/Prismatic%20Bell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a lot more to the old man in Stuttgart than Steve could ever have guessed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Men Like You

The air in Stuttgart is already cold.

Steve turns his collar up against it and jams his hands into his pockets; Natasha offered him a pair of gloves before they parted ways at Heathrow, but he wasn't expecting a day in early October to be this cold.

There are colder places, of course. Like the open sea east of Greenland, a place Steve could say he knows better than anybody really needs to.

The old man is sitting on a bench. Steve isn't surprised. Even in 1944 old men enjoyed benches in the park, and the plaza here is exceptionally pretty. Even, he guesses, if you nearly died there. He can still appreciate it, at least. He takes his time having a look around; the man he's here to see is sitting with his head back and his eyes closed, that posture of repose that says Steve has all day and five minutes would barely be noticed in spite of the day's chill.

But finally he approaches the bench, pulls a scrap of paper out of his pocket and reads the words on it, copied from a translation website Natasha helped him navigate. "Sie sind Herr Blass?"

The man on the bench opens his eyes and chuckles. "You must be Herr Rogers," he says, in English, and Steve breathes a sigh of relief, not bothering to correct Blass' address. He _can_ speak a little German, but it's mostly limited to words he'd never use in mixed company. The old man holds out a hand. "Heinrich Blass. But I suppose you already know that, yes?"

Steve nods, a single up-down, still trying to take in that he's here, back here, in the middle of Germany, and nobody is shooting at him. "I got your message." He considers trying for a smile, decides it wouldn't fit on his face right now, and deep-sixes the idea. "You wanted to talk to me."

"Wanted, wanted, no," Blass says, and stands up with a wince. "Want. That has not changed in quite some time. I would have come to you, but these days—" he gestures to what Steve assumes must be his bad leg—"I do not travel so well as I did once."

"I would have come sooner, but I was needed at home." Three months doesn't sound like 'quite some time' to Steve, but he's not going to argue the point. Blass smiles.

"Yes," he agrees, and then the wind gusts up and flips the lapels on his long trench coat, and he frowns. "I meant to ask if you would like a coffee," he says. "But my flat is closer than the cafe and you have saved my life, I think perhaps I owe you more than coffee, if that would be agreeable."

Steve's first impulse is to say no. He imagines he'll always feel that way about Germany a little bit, even though none of the people around him can possibly know who he is and would probably support him if they did, according to Fury (whom he only kind of trusts, by necessity) and Natasha (who he's already trusted unquestioningly with his life, and he'd do it again, and happily so). But the old man has no reason to wish him ill and if the situation really requires it Steve could probably incapacitate him just by slamming a door hard enough to create a breeze, judging by the look of him.

And there's steel in his spine. Steel, Steve reminds himself, that stood up to Loki when the consequences seemed to be swift, certain, and probably painful death. He would have been an asset to both teams Steve's commanded, of that much he's sure. So finally he just says "okay," and they shuffle across the square at Blass' old-man pace. Blass has a heavy limp but no cane, and after a particularly strong gust he accepts Steve's offer of an arm.

It's a short walk even shuffling, and fifteen minutes after they're inside Steve has been installed at a small kitchen table he's pretty sure is handmade, a cup of coffee with brandy steaming in front of him. He's never had coffee with brandy, but after he takes a sip he decides it's pretty swell. Nothing more than plain coffee to him, of course, but it has a good taste and anything hot goes down great on a day like this. "Good coffee. Thanks."

Blass makes a noise that Steve takes as affirmation. Then he comes back to the table with a sepia photograph: a beautiful young woman and a dark but handsome young man. He hands the photograph to Steve, who studies it.

"That is my sister," Blass tells him. "Katherine. And my brother-in-law, Jakob. He was a Jew." He shakes his head. "Only God may know why Katherine married him at such a time." He pauses. "No, perhaps I do, too. They were in love, and the heart has its own laws." He drains half his coffee in a single long gulp. "In any case, when the SS approached me and told me I could ensure Katherine's safety by enlisting—actively, you understand, my name had been on the rolls automatically since I turned fourteen—in the Hitler Youth, I saw no choice. She was so dear to me and our parents were dead. The idea of losing her, too—it was a thing I thought I could not bear. I was sixteen." 

Steve looks up, startled. Blass holds up his hands, palms showing, fingers open. 

"It is not a thing I liked. In those days, you did what you must, to survive. It was the winter of 1942." He takes another sip of coffee, this one less a desperate gulp and more a normal drink. "You might be wondering why I tell you this story, Herr Rogers. It is not a thing you just tell to men you meet on the street, even men who have saved your life—yes?"

"I guess you've heard I started out military."

Blass lets out an old man's caw of laughter. "It is true, that! But no, that is not why I tell you." He looks down at his coffee, then back up. "I was placed in the _Deutsche Arbeiter Jugend_ —the branch intended to be the scientists and technicians of the future. In the winter of 1942 I was one of the last members assigned to work with a military scientist named Johann Schmidt. You may know the name."

Steve reminds himself not to clench his coffee cup. If he does, it will surely shatter. "I think I've heard it."

"Heard it," Blass muses. "Yes. In any case our deployment was for a six-month assignment, but Schmidt was a madman, completely insane. We became cut off from the rest of the German forces, forced to take part in strange experiments and cruel exercises. It is strange that I should ever have to refer to Hitler as a savior, but what we saw in those months before the end made me long for a place in the Nazi ranks, if only to escape Schmidt. I had no taste for their work, but even less so for his."

"I understand."

Blass studies Steve's face. "I see that you do. Now I tell you the point of this story, yes? In the winter of 1943, thirteen months after my unit was placed with Schmidt, I was assigned a place on a supply train. We were perhaps halfway to our final destination when the train was raided by Americans." Blass puts his coffee to one side. "I very nearly died that day, Herr Rogers. I was traversing the cross-space—between the cars, you know?—and a man in blue wearing a white star and a hood came running toward me with a bright shield and a weapon in his hands, and I had none. So I put my hands in the air and thought that maybe he would kill me more quickly if he saw I was no threat. Instead . . . he looked at me, so closely I thought he must see every nightmare since I joined the HJ. And then he moved on like he had never been. I heard his friends calling to him in the next car. His name was also Rogers. Life is full of coincidences like that, I think."

Steve tries to nod, but everything feels strangely numb. Blass reaches out and takes the photograph from his hands, and that's okay; Steve's fingers might as well be getting orders from another planet right now.

"The train was derailed, but before it was I found a rope in the compartment and deserted right down the mountainside, never minding what it did to my body to flee in that way. I knew the train would burn. I would not be missed. And so under the convenient disguise of being dead I made my way back to Stuttgart, determined that I would not waste the chance the American gave me. Inside of two weeks Katherine and Jakob were in Sweden. They were able to return to Germany fifteen years before their deaths. In the 1960s, that was. Your sympathy is not necessary," Blass adds, possibly because Steve's shock has finally filtered onto his face. "They went at their times, after full lives. Much longer and more full, perhaps, than without that American."

He leans forward over the tiny kitchen table and taps the dark wood in front of Steve. "And then, three months ago, I see a man who would frighten even Johann Schmidt. I ask myself the question I have asked of every hard decision since I was seventeen years old, 'what would my American do?' And so I stood up. Perhaps you can imagine my surprise, Captain Rogers, when I saw that bright shield in front of me again, and looked into the eyes of the man carrying it, and knew them."

In his head, Steve jumps. In person he's been taking lessons from Natasha and he's proud of how still he stays, right up until Blass taps his hand instead of the table.

"Were you that American on that train, Captain Rogers?"

Steve has to take a breath before he can answer, even though he knows doing it is enough to invalidate any protest he makes.

"1943 was sixty-eight years ago, Herr Blass."

"It was," Blass agrees. "But here is a thing you may not know, Captain. You never forget the eyes of the man who held a ticket to your Maker in his hands, and chose not to redeem it." His eyes never waver, and Steve has to admire the man's moxie, looking that sure when he knows what he's saying has to sound totally crazy. "I was so sure of it that I convinced my granddaughter to look up war films. She is very good with the computers. And you see, Captain . . . you were on the television, fighting in New York, and the faces, they are the same. Angela printed pictures for me."

Steve leans back in his chair and tries to control his breath instead of letting it all come out in a rush. Blass smiles at him.

"I would not tell anyone," he comments. "And if I did, who would believe me, an old man with such history? But I am eighty-five years old. That is too old for lies."

Steve looks down at his hands, runs one over his face, tries to think. Finally he looks up.

"Yes," he says, and it's such a relief, even if the only person who knows was once a terrified boy on the other side of his shield, and how strange, now, that their paths have crossed again. "It was me. My team raided half a dozen HYDRA supply trains that winter."

Blass smiles widely. "Then you saved three lives, when you held your gun," he answers. "More, if we count lives not born at the time. And I have something for you." He reaches out and pats Steve's hand. "Wait here."

Steve waits. He sips his coffee in the meantime, remembering something his mother told him once about brandy for shock, and yes, it's a shock, all right. He should be bitter that an enemy survived that train ride; he can remember only one down a mountainside, and it's one he's not likely to forget in this lifetime. But he can't be, somehow. Knowing what this man dared changes everything.

And then he's back with something small in his hands. He holds out one fist, something held tightly inside it, and waits for Steve to hold out a hand to drop something small and cold and metal in Steve's palm. Steve takes it and turns it over, looks at it, studies it.

It's made of copper and brass—used shell casings. He'd know them anywhere. But they've been cut open and folded and melted and remade, and what's sitting in his hand, about four inches tall, is a metalwork of a child with a lamb. The flat back of the casings makes the platform on which the figurine stands.

"Jakob was a jeweler," Blass says. "When they returned he would walk the old places, picking up bullets, and he made them into things like these. I used to wonder what he would do such a foolish thing for, when nobody wanted to remember the terrible things that had happened, to memorialize them at all. But he made these figurines along with his regular jewelry, and in time people would purchase them, too. A reminder that beauty can rise from the ashes. There will always be men who want to destroy. But there are also always the men who turn destruction into life. Like Jakob, and like you." He folds Steve's fingers over the girl with her lamb. "This is yours. If I had more, I would give it. Everything I have is owed to you."

"You don't owe me anything," Steve protests. "I was just doing a job."

Blass shakes his head and smiles. "No, if you had shot me on sight you would have just done your job. But you spared me and kept going, never knowing if I had a weapon hidden out of sight I might pull as soon as your back was turned. You changed my life on that day, Captain Rogers. You showed me what it meant to be brave, a lesson I had never learned. You saved my family without ever seeing them, not just my sister and her husband, but sons and grandchildren not born when we first met. And it is also because of you that my grandchildren still have their Opa for more years, however many I may have left. You may say I owe you nothing, but my heart says I owe you a great debt."

"I still don't think you owe me anything," Steve answers him, but in his head he can hear his mother's ghost whisper, so he keeps going: "But thank you."

Blass' smile never changes. "It is an honor to finally put it in the hand it was intended for." He looks up at the clock. Steve looks down at his wristwatch and realizes he never reset it. Blass sighs.

"I would offer you a place to stay tonight, but your—Director, is it? The one named Fury—told me you would be here only in passing."

Steve nods. "I have an assignment." He feels his mouth twitch, and he's startled to realize it's actual amusement. It's been a long time since he's felt it. "Captain America is going to the Czech Republic."

Blass laughs that hearty old-man's caw. "So! We should call you the Captain of the Earth, I think, for all the places you have done good." He gets up from his chair, a little more limber now; either the warmth or the brandy or both, Steve guesses. "I will take you to the North Station so you can go to the airport. I think there is something there you wanted to see."

Steve nods. He hasn't been to the museum in D.C. yet; he's pretty sure it would swallow him whole to go alone, and he has nobody he can ask. But the memorial at North Station is something he thinks he can handle on his own. 

There's an actual car to North Station, one with a working heater and a radio tuned to a station that makes Steve jump when he hears it. He knows that voice.

"Isn't that Marlene Dietrich?"

Blass chuckles. "Yes. She was popular here, too, you know. It was the Nazis she hated, not her homeland."

"I didn't think I'd ever hear something like that on the radio again."

"Oh, there are stations, here and there, that play the music from the old times," Blass says, as he pulls into the train station. "I told you earlier that if I had more to give you, I would. Will you take a piece of advice, in that spirit?"

"I'm always open for good advice."

Blass turns off the car. "Then, it is this. Do not wait a single day if there is something you must say, or someone you must say it to. Say all that is in your heart whenever you have the chance. You will never know when the chance may be taken from you." He slips out of the car, and Steve follows. Blass meets him at the back and holds out a hand. Steve takes it.

"I hope you will do well," Blass says. Steve nods.

"Thanks," he answers, and Blass nods at the platform. 

"I will wait until you have your ticket," he says. "Goodbye, Captain Rogers. With all my thanks."

Steve curls his fingers around the little brass girl in his pocket. "The same to you, sir."

He's watching from the platform as Blass drives away. He wonders what it must have been like, being in the Army or something like it by force instead of by choice, and barely even old enough to shave. Then he reaches into his jeans and pulls out a little black gadget, a gift from Tony after all attempts to get Steve to use an iPhone failed: _here_ , he'd said, _it's so simple your grandfather could have figured it out._

He touches the screen, scrolls with his finger, hesitates.

_Do not wait a single day if there is something you must say._

He makes his selection and puts the phone to his ear, and waits. A few hours west, a voice speaks in his ear.

"Peggy?" he says. "I know Fury talked to you." He takes a breath. "This is Steve."

**Author's Note:**

> HISTORICAL NOTES AND MISCELLANY:
> 
> \--The old man's name, Blass, is an Americanization and alternate spelling of my family's ancestral name, Bloẞ. It means "bare" or "naked" and while it is my family name I chose it for the implications of the old man having been "naked" (undefended) in Steve's presence. 
> 
> \--The thing Steve goes to see at North Station is a memorial to victims of the Holocaust sent to a camp in Riga from this same station. Approximately 2 000 Jews and other "undesirables" were deported from the Stuttgart station.
> 
> \--Marlene Dietrich's most famous song, "Lili Marlene," was recorded by her in both English and German and still appears regularly on big band radio in both America and Germany. Unfortunately, Steve would recognize her only by her voice--her famous and beautiful German recordings (including both versions of Lili Marlene) began in 1945.
> 
> \--Steve's question is a direct translation via Google Translate: "Are you Mr. Blass?" 
> 
> \--The Deutsche Arbeiter Jugend are the German Working Youth, an arm of the Hitler Youth.


End file.
